This Week In The Laboratories Of Democracy

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where you take what you have gathered from coincidence.

Let's begin, unusually, here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) where a fellow named Scott Lively is, well, enlivening things by putting the goober in the "gubernatorial" election through the injection of the undistilled wingnut crazy juice. I thought that was simply an interesting exhibit in the usual freak show until some Top Commenters set me straight. Scott Lively is a really, really bad guy. To wit:

From Sacramento, Lively ended up in Temecula Calif., where he continued to run Abiding Truth Ministries, but a new side project had presented itself through his connections in Sacramento, which has a large population of evangelical Christian Russian immigrants. Lively found a receptive audience for his theory about gay men and the Nazis. Russians and other immigrants from Eastern Europe remembered only too well the atrocities committed at the hands of the Nazis, and Lively's Holocaust revisionism resonated among some in the immigrant communities. In 2007, Lively launched the virulently anti-LGBT group Watchmen on the Walls along with Sacramento-based Russian radio host Vlad-Kusakin, Seattle megachurch pastor Ken Hutcherson, and Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev. Thus began the overseas dimension of Lively's anti-LGBT outreach. Lively promoted Watchmen on the Walls as an international network of Christian activists dedicated to fighting the "homosexual agenda." In 2007, he traveled to Riga, the capital of Latvia, and spoke at Ledyaev's church, where he railed against the gay rights movement, calling it "the most dangerous political movement in the world." In early March 2009, he went to Uganda to deliver what would become known as his infamous talk at the Triangle Hotel in Kampala at an anti-LGBT conference organized by Family Life Network leader Stephen Langa. The conference, titled "Exposing the Truth behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda," also included Don Schmierer, a board member of the ex-gay therapy group Exodus International, and Caleb Brundidge Jr., a self-professed ex-gay man with ties to the ex-gay therapy group Healing Touch. Thousands of Ugandans attended the conference, including law enforcement, religious leaders, and government officials. They were treated to a litany of anti-LGBT propaganda, including the false claims that being molested as a child causes homosexuality, that LGBT people are sexual predators trying to turn children gay by molesting them, and that gay rights activists want to replace marriage with a culture of sexual promiscuity. Lively met with Ugandan lawmakers during the conference, and in a blog post later he likened his campaign against LGBT people to a "nuclear bomb" against the "gay agenda" that had gone off in Uganda.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Say what you will about Lively, he's had an impact.

A month later, the Ugandan parliament was considering legislation that included the death penalty for LGBT people in some instances and life imprisonment for others. According to Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Episcopal priest from Zambia (now in Boston) who went to the conference under cover, Lively's talking points were included in the bill's preamble. In the ensuing international backlash against the bill, Lively claimed that he did not support the death penalty for homosexuality but that if the "offending sections" were modified, the proposed law criminalizing homosexuality "would be an encouraging step in the right direction." In a 2010 documentary about the Uganda bill titled "Missionaries of Hate," broadcast journalist Mariana van Zeller asked Lively about it. He responded that the lesser of two evils would be to allow the bill to go through as is, because, he claimed, not letting it be enacted allowed "the American and the European gay activists to continue to do to that country what they've done here [in the U.S.]."

Most Popular

So this guy is a vicious bigot who was run out of Oregon, and then out of California, before settling here in Springfield. He is the sexual equivalent of a Holocaust revisionist historian. He has cheered on -- and, arguably, inspired -- anti-gay pogroms all over the world. And WBZ-TV's political analyst, Jon Keller, gave this lunatic a place on the stage with the other candidates, and nobody (including Keller, who moderated the debate) thought Lively's career as an international man of hatred worthy of comment. Indeed, after the debate, Keller congratulated himself for being broadminded enough to include the independent candidates, and said that they contributed a lot to the discussion. (And, yo, Evan Falchuk and Jeff McCormick? You're rather stuck here. By playing the "include us" card over and over again, you're enabling bigotry and incitement to violent, state-sponsored hate crime. Tough spot to be in.) Be proud, WBZ.

Let's go Commonwealth to Commonwealth and find ourselves in Kentucky, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell somehow got crossways with a sports-radio host and came out second-best.

However, McConnell was on the defensive when Jones asked him who he rooted for when Kentucky played its in-state rival, the University of Louisville.

"It is OK - it's probably not acceptable to you as a [Barack] Obama enthusiast - but it's okay to be for both Louisville and Kentucky," McConnell snapped, explaining that he completed his undergraduate studies at Louisville and graduated from Kentucky's law school, and comparing the choice to picking between his three daughters.

"What does me being an Obama supporter have to do with Kentucky vs. Louisville?" Jones asked.

"It's just something you and I don't agree on," McConnell said.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The fk? Is Mitch losing it a little? Being A Dick to a sports-talk host is genuinely bizarre, unless you coach an NFL team or the host is Colin Cowherd, in which case Being A Dick to a sports-talk host is mandatory.

Skipping off to Kansas, we discover that Governor Sam Brownback (R-Council Of Trent) has found the true culprits behind the descent of his approval numbers toward Middle Earth. It's not his cracked devotion to cracked supply-side economic policies. It's...wait for it...the liberal media.

I think they (the mainstream media) want what's happening in this state to fail that they're shopping for a factual setting to back that up because it's working. I think the left is just so desperate. They want this model to fail so bad that they can't wait for it to and they just want to get me electorally before we get on through this and prove that this is working.

Shopping for a factual setting to prove that Brownback's attempt to turn Kansas into Arthur Laffer's petri dish has failed is like shopping for nails at Home Depot. It's not exactly the search for the Templar treasure, is what I'm saying.

Meanwhile, over in Colorado, a guy named Bob Beauprez is running for governor, and my old pal Mike Littwin has the 411, and also the l-o-o-n.

Here's the money quote from Beauprez's 2010 interview with on-line, hard-line radio host Clayton Douglas, in which they were discussing, among other things, living under a "one world order": "When they can start tracking us with a little microchip, and the technology certainly exists, and you watch the people who would line up voluntarily so that, gee, if you forgot your driver's license, no problem, you've got the RFID implanted in you. If you've got to get through the airport, no problem, you've got RFID. 'Well, sure, I want one of those, I want one of those.' And you watch like sheep how they would line up behind some kind of a dopey system like that without ever realizing how much freedom they just forfeited."

Race is basically a tie, by the way.

And we conclude, as always, in Oklahoma, where Blog Oil Derrick Diver Friedman of the Plains brings us the story of plucky women out in the country's sandy parts who have had enough of the bullying of the Obama IRS with which she and God have been afflicted...somehow.

Ward 2 Mustang City Councilwoman Kathleen Staples spoke out against the proposed amendment. "I don't like being told what to do by the IRS or Obama," Staples said...Ward 3 City Councilwoman Linda Bowers casted the sole 'No' vote regarding the amendment. "I understand that employees would have to be taxed if we don't approve this," Bowers said. "As a council member, I have to make decisions for our employees. But I think about God first in all my decisions."